How do I ask for a string input?

n=input("Number of files: ");
for i=1:n
    FileName(i) = input("File Name:  ","s");

Here is my code which ends up giving me an error message saying

I'm simply asking for a string and inputting it into FileName which should hold all the string

    Unable to perform assignment because the indices on the left side are not compatible with the size of the right side.

Error in DataReader (line 6)
    FileName(i) = input("File Name:  ","s");
 

What am I doing wrong? Just 20 minutes ago my code was working perfectly fine

Answer 1

[Star Strider]

It is likely easier to save it to a cell array —

FileName{i} = input("File Name: ","s");

That worked when I tried it offline.

See Access Data in Cell Array if you are unfamiliar with cell arrays.

.

[Hakob Enfiajyan]

I'm familiary with them and that's what I ended up doing. I'm just not sure what the problem was since it worked just fine before it started glitching.

[Star Strider]

That surprised me as well, because:

str = "string"

str = "string"

whos str

  Name      Size            Bytes  Class     Attributes

  str       1x1               150  string              

k = 1;
test(k) = str

test = "string"

obviously works.

It may be something to do with how the input function works (or doesn’t work in this instance). That it apparently can’t work and play well with string inputs may be a bug. I was definitely able to reproduce the problem with giving input a string however I couldn’t find a work-around for it, other than the cell array approach.

I generally use inputdlg (that creates a cell array for the returned argument), rather than input, so I have essentially no experience with input.

.

[Hakob Enfiajyan]

There's maybe some type of bug. Thank you for the inputdlg idea, I did it again using that and it worked perfectly.

[Star Strider]

As always, my pleasure!

It also leaves the Command Window free, another reason I prefer it.